when General Cheng’s emissaries tried to explain away the Xunhe “incident” by claiming that the presence of PLA troops was in response to concerns over banditry in the area. Bandits, it was said, had been responsible for launching the hit-and-run attack on the Japanese Defense Force — the PLA presence merely a reaction to the Americans violating the integrity of China’s borders.
“Oh no,” President Mayne said, “not this time. Those bastards can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They started this. We’ll finish it.”
“What can we do?” press secretary and adviser Trainor asked. “Beatty made a complete hash of—”
“Reinstate Freeman!”
“But Mr. President…” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff began.
“Unleash him!” Mayne ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“But Trainor—” the president added.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Tell him to end it as soon as he contains it. This isn’t a fishing expedition.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think that’ll do it, Mr. President?” inquired Schuman, the national security advisor.
“We’ll see,” Mayne answered.
The president’s advisers were not sure what he meant by it. What would they see? The end of the fighting, or how difficult it was to contain Douglas Freeman once he was unleashed?
CHAPTER TEN
“That son of a bitch tried to kill me.” They were the first words Freeman uttered upon touching down at Khabarovsk.
“You mean Cheng?” Norton inquired.
“I mean Cheng. Monkey wants to make it personal. Well, Dick, I won’t fall for that piece of Sun Tzu about getting angry and then losing the battle because you lose your head. I’m not angry, Norton.”
“No, sir.”
“I’m mad as hell!” Freeman pulled on his learner gloves. “Weather’s supposed to be warming up.”
“It is, sir.”
“Course, Dick,” Freeman said, striding toward his staff car like an old athlete resurrected, “trick is not to stay mad. Be cool. Rational.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s his disposition of forces?”
“We figure it at ten divisions minimum on the Manchurian border. More coming.”
“They got that damn Nanking Bridge fixed over the Yangtze?” It was the bridge that the captured Smythe and the other SEALs had attacked and severed earlier in the war.
“Figure they must have, General,” Norton said. “Either that or they’ve put a pontoon across — though that would take some making. It’s at least three miles across there.”
Freeman grunted, pulled up his collar, and buttoned it at the throat. “Should be warmer than this. We heard anything from that SAS/D troop?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s good news then.” The commandos were on radio silence.
“We hope, sir.”
“How far would they be from Ulan Bator?”
“They ‘re flying in on a Pave Low now.”
“What’s the drill?” Freeman asked. “A burst radio message approximately forty-eight hours from now when they’ve completed their mission?”
“Yes, sir — if they do.”
“Pray to God we get that message through, Dick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else?” He sensed there was — Norton had that look about him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Spit it out!”
Norton slipped a folder from his flip-top briefcase as they entered the Quonset hut. “Bad news I’m afraid. Photos,” he said, taking a steaming cup of coffee from the general. “All from Ofek-10.” It was the Israeli high- resolution electro-optical camera satellite, one of those launched by IAI–Israeli Aviation Industries — using a Shavit, or “comet” rocket, known to Freeman’s G-2 staff as a “Shove it!”
“Well,” Freeman said, looking down at the whitish shape made by the microdot-size pixels that looked about half the size of a cigarette filter against a background of gray, barren landscape. “Sure as hell aren’t Scuds.”
“East Winds,” Norton said. “Type four. Confirmed by the Pentagon. Conventional or three-megaton payload. Range three thousand miles. Has a circular error probability of around plus or minus two miles — so Tel Aviv says. But a CEP of plus or minus two miles doesn’t matter much if they’re after a big target like a city or—”
“An army,” Freeman said.
“Yes, sir. They’re theater-level offensive all right — not divisional. That’s why I thought you ought to see them straight away.”
Freeman sat down, patting his shirt for his bifocals, couldn’t find them, and had to go to the makeshift bedroom where he retrieved a spare pair from atop a Gideon Bible, its pages held open by a box of buckshot cartridges for the Winchester 1200 shotgun he kept by his bedside. The general found he didn’t need his glasses after all, for even without them Israeli and Pentagon intelligence reports had already concurred with Dick Norton’s assessment, classifying the missiles in large, black capitals as INF — intermediate nuclear forces — from PLA’s Second Artillery. He was shaking his head in disgust as well as alarm.
“I told them in Washington. I told them the moment those goddamned fairies signed that INF treaty with the Russians. While we were sending our Pershings to the scrap heap, and the Russians were doing the same—” He looked up at Norton, then back down at the missiles, a cluster of six of them. “Beijing, my friend, was grinning — ear-to-ear. Moment Gorby and Reagan signed the INF, China became the number one INF power in the world. You figure the fairies didn’t think of that?” Freeman was getting madder by the second. “I tell you what, Norton, when I think of all that goddamn incompetence running around loose in Washington it makes my blood—” The general stopped midsentence, directing a wary glance at Norton. “These infrared confirmed?”
“Yes, sir.” Norton knew that the general was remembering the humiliation heaped upon him by the press — the La Roche tabloids in particular — for the casualties Second Army had suffered earlier in the Siberian campaign, when Freeman believed, as intelligence had reported, that he was about to engage a division of enemy tanks hidden in the taiga. They had also been infrared confirmed, the Siberians having simply put battery-powered heaters inside the plastic mockups of the T-80s to give off a sufficient infrared signature to fool aerial reconnaissance.
As well as leading his armor into the trap, Freeman had sent Apaches on ahead to soften the Siberian armor up, only to have over fifteen of the Hellfire missile-armed choppers blown out of the sky by VAMs, or vertical area mines. Freeman knew that he’d been lucky that he’d lost only the battle on the Never-Skovorodino road and not the war. It was a lesson he’d not soon forget. “Any other confirmation?” he pressed Norton.
Norton reached over, turning past the photographs to page three of the typed report. “Yes, sir. Indentation. We can tell from blowups of the tire tracks in the desert approximately how many tons the carrier vehicles and loads are. The indentation weight equals that of a missile. If they’re fakes, they’re sure as hell heavy ones. And you know how the ChiComs are about fuel. It’s damn near a capital offense to waste a gallon in the Chinese army. I don’t think they’d be driving heavy fakes around for fun.”
From the coordinates, Freeman could tell at a glance that it was somewhere in Sinkiang province, Lanzhou military region. “Missile sites at Lop Nor?”
“Further west than that,” Norton answered. “Past the Turpan depression — in the foothills of the Tien Shan
